


Recruitment

by Castillon02



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-04 18:33:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18610159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Castillon02/pseuds/Castillon02
Summary: Q flees the country after subduing an unknown agent (Bond) who has been sent to retrieve him for hacking the wrong person. All Q wants is to be left alone; he doesn't expect that Bond will chase him across Europe or that a mysterious criminal organization will join the hunt.





	1. Chapter 1

Q woke up with a gun in his face. It was being held by a hard-eyed man who was hiding what looked like a lot of muscles underneath his Tom Ford suit. 

Well. Q had always known someone would come for him one day. He gripped the blankets in order to keep his hands out of trouble, stop them from doing something silly like trying to fight back. His mobile was…somewhere. Great; very helpful. “Can I help you?” he asked, squinting to look at the man beyond the barrel of the gun. Blue eyes, blond hair, grim expression, slightly blurry. When Q had time, he was going to engineer a pair of glasses he could wear to bed. 

“You can,” the man confirmed. “You’re going to come with me. There’s an important woman who wants a word with you, something about needing some IT help with our servers. Can’t imagine why.” His mouth quirked in a fake smile. He stepped back, his eyes never leaving Q, and jerked the gun in a ‘get up’ gesture. 

Q extricated himself from the blankets with care, not wanting to aggravate the man with the gun by making any sudden movements. Whose servers, exactly…? He had been in so many of them. 

As he shifted, his knee knocked against his mobile under the sheets. 

“What?” the man asked immediately. Shit; apparently he was the type of goon who could actually use his eyes, and Q was far too used to being able to hide his face behind a screen.  

“My phone,” Q said, because he couldn’t lie worth a damn. He could, however, trick himself into feeling a very specific fear. What if the man destroyed it? It had taken ages to make that mobile! He looked up at the man with wide eyes.  

“Throw it on the floor next to my feet,” the man directed. 

Q let his relief show. Not destroyed just yet. He focused on that thought—he was relieved the man wasn’t destroying his hard work—even as his clever fingers gripped the phone under the blankets and executed their triple-tapping trick on the power button before drawing it out and tossing it at the man’s feet. 

Q started a mental countdown. 30, 29, 28… 

“Up,” the man repeated. “And I’ll take this, since it seems so important.” He picked the phone up and slipped it into his jacket pocket, his gun never wavering.  

_Don’t throw me in the briar patch, Brer Fox._ “Please don’t,” Q said, still honestly concerned in his brain’s own tricky way. After all, what if the man had a pacemaker? 

“Now,” the man repeated, snapping his gloved fingers. “We have somewhere to be.” 18, 17, 16… 

“That’s a Beretta, isn’t it?” Q asked. 

The man stepped forward, apparently impatient, and Q flinched away, hands held high, not a threat, definitely not a threat. He couldn’t have the man touching him.  

“Only,” Q said, “it’s a great gun, but it’s got an external hammer, right? It tends to snag?” 

The man stared at him. “What?” 

8…7…6…

“You should use something like a Walther PPK,” Q said. “Still small, still automatic, better draw time.” 

The man drew in a quick breath, eyes narrowing. “Yes, please keep lecturing me about my own gun, you little---” At that point the man’s mouth dropped open, his eyes flicking down to his chest where the needle-like probes from Q’s mobile-cum-taser prototype had just stabbed him, probably in multiple locations. “F---” 

The ‘uck’ was lost in a shout as electricity crackled through the air and the man’s body convulsed, fifteen million volts coursing through him. A few moments later, he was twitching on the ground, his gun thrown clear by his trembling fingers. Thank fuck it hadn’t gone off.  

Q jerked open his bedside drawer, withdrew a medical syringe full of ketamine, double-checked that it was free of air bubbles, and then stabbed the man in the shoulder. He kept his finger on the plunger until it was empty. It was difficult to fatally overdose someone on ketamine. If they were lucky, the man would stay in a happy, unmoving daze for a few hours, and he wouldn’t even remember Q when he woke up; ketamine often had amnesiac effects. 

(If they were unlucky, or if the man already had alcohol in his bloodstream…well, the man would still be mostly paralyzed, but it might be a bad trip.)

Q grabbed his glasses, his laptop, and his go bag. After waiting a few interminable minutes to make sure the man was really out, he dragged him into the recovery position so he wouldn’t drown in his own vomit. 

_ Sorry not sorry, _ Q wrote, scribbling a note to leave under the man’s gun. _ I don’t do well in captivity.  _

He had his fake papers and his disguise in his bag. A few hours would be plenty of time to get out of England and into a safer sort of country. It wasn’t like the man would chase him across the globe, right?    


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q foils Bond in Berlin.

The bell on the cafe door rang; Q glanced up and froze. It was him! The man Q mentally referred to as That Fucker, the one who had forced Q out of the UK at last, even if Q had had the distinct pleasure of tazing him first.

Q’s hands wanted to flinch off his laptop keyboard and grab for the umbrella on the back of his chair; he forced them to stay where they were. Why the fuck was That Fucker in an adorable steampunk coffee shop in Berlin? Q hadn’t published any of his better inventions; he hadn’t stolen any particularly juicy information recently; he hadn’t even stolen any money in a while, given that the thing with those drug dealing accounts six months ago had gone so well. One of them had even belonged to a terrorist group, so really Q had been doing a public service.

The man had the temerity to smirk and wave at him as he picked his way through the crowd of nerds in the cafe. People slid out of his way instinctively, possibly because of the suit, possibly because of the muscles, possibly just because he gave off an aura that somehow conveyed that he was trained in the fine art of getting what he wanted and was willing to be the carrot or the stick as needed.

Q had seen what the stick looked like. Perhaps he was about to meet the carrot.

“Hello again,” the man said, stopping in front of Q’s table. He held out a hand. “I think we got off to a bad start. The name is Bond. James Bond.” He smiled. It was a nice smile. Probably like a vampire’s right before it ate you.

Q ignored the hand. ‘James Bond.’ Really? Might as well have called himself John Smith. If he were going to give an alias, he could at least be cute about it. Richard Something, maybe, because the man was clearly a dick.

“Charmed,” Q said dryly, peering at the footage from a CCTV camera outside the cafe. Yes, there it was—the same Aston Martin that had been outside his flat in London when he’d skipped out. Luckily, he’d taken a moment to get its details.

Without asking for permission, ‘Bond’ sat down in the chair opposite Q’s. “Nice little phone you had,” he said, undoubtedly referring to Q’s stun gun mobile. “Self-destructed rather thoroughly when we tried to open it.”

Q had left it for that very purpose, hoping the man would get a tiny bit exploded for good measure. “I like to keep myself to myself,” he said pointedly.

“I think,” the man said, leaning forward conspiratorially, “that what you really like is to get into other people’s business. And probably to explode things.” He grinned. “As it happens, so do I.”  

…Was that a hint that the man was planning an explosive revenge? With no subtlety, Q reached into the laptop bag at his feet and flicked the switch on his signal jammer.

The man, who’d tensed up when Q moved, cocked his head and frowned. Something about the movement…

Hmm. Apparently That Fucker was wired up, or had been until Q’s jammer had taken care of the issue. The possibility of That Fucker belonging to some kind of evil organization looked more and more probable.  

“And apparently you like privacy, too,” the man said, recovering himself. “Care to go somewhere a little more…intimate? Perhaps we can get to know each other better without an audience.” He gave Q a smoldering look. It was rendered less than effective by Q’s knowledge that by ‘without an audience’ the man probably meant ‘where no one can hear you scream.’

Instead of swooning at the man’s molten blue fuck-me eyes, Q curled his ankles around his chair ridiculously. He liked this cafe. He refused to be kidnapped from it. It was time for Plan C. “Benefits!” he blurted out. “What are your benefits like?” He double-checked his photo of the Aston’s license number, executed a command prompt on his laptop, and unleashed a series of pre-programmed little bots. Unfortunately, this plan, unlike the one back in London, would take a little while. Seeing the man’s leer, he added, “The ones that are offered by your organization, not the carnal ones, Mr. Bond.”

The man blinked. “You want me to give you the employment package?”

Q eyed him. “I can hardly be expected to make decisions without knowing if your organization offers dental or not.” They would just threaten to pry his teeth out of their sockets once they had him, but forcing the man to talk shop about his organization’s HR policies ought to give Q enough stalling time.

“You know, it would be much easier to do that if I still had someone talking in my ear who could look up the details,” the man said wryly. “I’m afraid I don’t know what kind of benefits we offer to speccy nerds. But I think I have a better idea: why don’t you tell me what you’d like, and I’ll see if I can get it for you?” The man winked at him.

Q flushed. He _liked_ when big, strong men offered to please him. Still: “You can fuck off, that’s the first thing,” he said.

Bond looked smug. “Aside from that,” he said.

It had been worth a shot.    

***

Q kept Bond busy for an hour, mostly by chatting about ideal laboratory conditions. He sketched schematics on napkins. He talked about safety codes. He ranted about standing desks. Then, when Bond was too bored to protest much, Q plied him with questions about what kinds of gadgets would be useful in his line of work; he was always looking for new inspiration.

Bond had an amused quirk to his eyebrows that said he knew Q was stalling, but he went along with it rather than cause a scene, which Q had rather been counting on.

The stun phone hadn’t been bad, Bond said. He enjoyed covert household goods converted into weaponry. (Bond eyed the umbrella hooked over the back of Q’s chair.) But most of all he appreciated reliability, especially in his firearms and his— “Erk,” Bond said, whipping his head around to look fully out the cafe window.

A tow truck was just driving off, and Bond’s Aston Martin was hooked to the back of it.

Q smiled. “You should probably get that,” he said. “Wouldn’t want anything to fall into the wrong hands.”

Just a guess, really, but from the way Bond’s eyes narrowed, Q had been right. The Aston had some illicit hardware. Maybe that Beretta from before, tucked under a seat. Maybe more.

“Make them put it back,” Bond growled. “Tell them it was a mistake.”

Ah, back to threats. Goodbye Mr. Carrot, hello Mr. Stick.  

“I don’t think I will,” Q said coolly. “I think you’ll leave me alone and go fetch it at the lot before anyone can take too much of a look at it. By the time you get there, the news of the misunderstanding will have come through and everyone will be very apologetic. Some sort of glitch in the system; it happens.”

“And you’ll be gone,” Bond said. “And some sort of ‘glitch in the system’ will cover your tracks.” A complicated look flashed across his face—anger, understanding, other things that Q couldn’t identify.      

“I like to keep myself to myself,” Q repeated. He kept his eyes on Bond, assessing; Bond could always try the public kidnapping route, but he had no way of knowing what other safeguards Q had surrounded himself with.

Bond stood and walked around to Q’s side of the table.

Q jerked his umbrella off his chair and held it in his lap, ready to stab.

Bond planted his hands on the table next to Q’s laptop, rough-knuckled and no rings, and leaned over Q’s chair. “Do you know what I like?” he asked, murmuring in Q’s ear.

The hair on the back of Q’s neck stood on end. He swallowed.

“I like a good chase,” Bond said, his breath hot against the thrumming pulse of Q’s carotid. Then Bond left---just walked out the door with another cheeky wave.

Q gripped his umbrella with white knuckles until the CCTV feed on his laptop showed Bond hailing a taxi and getting in.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q starts to get good at locating assassins.

That Fucker seemed determined to be persistent, so Q made research a priority as he zigzagged his way across Czechia. (Czechia had a reliable railway and bus system, and also, he discovered, the most delicious apricot dumplings, called _svestkove knedliky_. It was a very nice country to be ‘on the run’ in.)

There were a lot of James Bonds in Britain, but only a couple were mentioned on the Darknet. The one who best matched the description of ‘blond, muscular, and really annoying’ had three contracts out on him. Following the breadcrumbs to the clients showed that this Bond had apparently angered organized criminals, terrorists, and...a billionaire gold smuggler named Goldfinger, now deceased, who’d had the foresight to have a kill contract prepared in the event of his death.

Goldfinger was the only one who hadn’t bothered to conceal his involvement. Possibly, judging by the trail of dead, gold-painted women he’d left behind him, Goldfinger had simply doubted that any consequences could reach him even if he were alive.

If Bond really had killed Goldfinger, he’d done the world a fucking favor.

Still, Q sent an email to the indicated address, deadmanswitch@au.ric: _Interested in engaging with JB, having already encountered him. Background information is requested._

Almost instantly, he got a form email back that included a basic dossier on Bond. It included a creepy surveillance photo taken of Bond frowning and poking at a plate of apparently substandard spagbol, so Q knew he had the right man. Apparently “Which James Bond is he, anyway?” was an FAQ.

Hmm. Former Navy Commander. Oxford, with a specialization in Asian languages. Scottish boarding school. No living relatives or close friends. Frequently posed as a wealthy businessman, but probably worked as an intelligence agent now. Strong knowledge of judo, firearms, and “miscellaneous weaponry.”

Q wasn’t going to break into Five or Six’s servers to confirm or deny anything. Christ. Bond was either a mercenary working for some shitty Villains R Us organization or he was working for one of the biggest evils of them all: the government.

The Goldfinger form email also included a number with rather a lot of zeros on the end of it: the reward for collecting Bond’s head. Q spent a good few minutes remembering how helpless Bond had been in Q’s London flat and reminding himself that living in luxury for the rest 0f his life still wouldn’t be worth the skeeviness of committing murder.

_Fancy tea! No more bills! As many server farms as you want!_ his inner child shouted.  

_Disgusting bloodstains, icky nightmares, and eternal regret from violating what’s left of your moral code_ , Q countered. Anyway, he could afford fancy tea already, he just didn’t have anywhere to keep it because he was still living out of his go-bag for security reasons...which, going back to the original problem, was all Bond’s fault.

As far as Q could tell, Bond mostly made the lives of bad men more difficult, much like Q did. It would be pretty hypocritical for Q to kill him. In fact, the best way to keep Bond off Q’s scent might be to put him on the track of others. It would be hard to justify trailing after Q when Bond could be going after Murderface McBadMan instead.

And if Murderface McBadMan happened to injure Bond enough that Bond had to go home and convalesce for a while, all the better.

Right. Yes. He could work with this. One gift-wrapped Murderface coming right up.

***

To Q’s chagrin, ‘coming right up’ actually took a few days. For whatever reason, a suitably juicy assassin target could be hard to locate. However, Q was learning a few tricks and developing more sophisticated programming to do some of the grunt work for him: scanning social media posts for facial recognition, invading CCTV feeds, phishing to gain access to hotel networks. Next time he would be faster.  

Once he had his target and his information, there were lots of complicated ways by which Q could have communicated with Bond. He could have hacked into nearby electronic billboards. He could have flickered a streetlight in Morse. He could even have sent a telegram. Instead he went with a more Gordian solution and had a burner phone delivered to Bond’s hotel room.

(That Fucker was in Vienna. Of course he was, because that was, infuriatingly, exactly where Q had been planning on going next and where Q would now have to avoid. He spent a moment mourning his future lack of Viennese coffee and museums.)   

The burner phone rang three times. Someone picked up.

“Bond?” Q asked.

“Q,” Bond replied. “This isn’t going to explode, is it?” He seemed amused as well as, finally, a little cautious.     

“Probably not,” Q said. Despite the name, he hadn’t packed the burner phone with explosives. “You know the fellow who stole that defected Russian general from a government safe house last month? Posed as a milkman, used exploding milk bottles, and there was a drone overhead that ‘just so happened’ to get footage of all those British agents dying because of a single foreign assassin wearing a neon green safety jacket?”

“Necros,” Bond said, his voice flat and cold now. “Yes.”

“Perhaps you’d like to chase after him instead of me,” Q said. “I’m sending you his coordinates. Ta.”

“Wh---”

“Have fun.” Q hung up. He sent Bond a short dossier on Necros’s recent activity (he’d been shadowing a man called Saunders) as well as the coordinates of Necros’ hotel in Vienna. It was half a mile away from Bond’s own hotel; apparently possibly-government-affiliated hitmen liked to stay in the same area of the city.

Would Bond be able to resist this new target? Would he even want to? Surely trailing a speccy git who had tased him and towed his car couldn’t be that appealing.

No; stressing about Bond’s reaction was pointless. No matter what happened tonight, Q would be gaining more data about and more distance from Bond, and both of those things gave him an advantage. He tossed the cheap mobile he’d been calling from into a bin and boarded his train to Kraków.

(Kraków had an excellent historic district. If he was going to be doing all this traveling, he might as well see some World Heritage sites).


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Q throws assassins in Bond's direction, takes in a Bulgarian tourist site, and attracts the attention of two more homicidal berks.

Q had ‘cheap mobiles’ logged in his budget next to food and travel expenses. He never texted Bond from the same number twice.  

Bond, on the other hand, kept the burner phone Q had mailed him, probably to lure Q into a false sense of security. It was easy for Q to track it. 

For the next several weeks, they played tag. Or perhaps ‘monkey in the middle’ would be more accurate, given that Q always kept a third party between them. An arms dealer in Vilnius. An identified double agent in Chisinau. A terrorist called Carla the Jackal in Bucharest and a hitman named Marco Sciarra in Sofia. 

The Aladzha Monastery in Varna was Q’s latest destination. It didn’t have any hitmen that Q knew of; it just looked nice on the tourism website. The pale limestone caves, carved into a vertical cliff face by monks hundreds of years ago, were filled with mosaics and worn-away murals of Christ. Q wasn’t religious, but he made the trek up to the caves to look at them. What might the programming equivalent of that tile technique be? Could his systems ever hope to fend off the inevitability of time as well as these caves had? The caves were obsolete, of course, not having been lived in for centuries, but the purpose of each room in the monastery remained clear. Given hundreds of years, would people be able to interpret the purpose his own works so clearly? 

Someone walked up and Q shuffled to the side, politely offering whoever it was more room to view the mosaic. 

“Good to see you again,” Bond said next to him. 

Q made an embarrassing, strangled sound in the back of his throat and jumped half a foot in the air. 

“Steady,” Bond said. He clapped a hand on Q’s shoulder. He was smirking, the absolute arse. 

Q took one giant step back, scooting himself out of Bond’s grasp and towards the cave wall. “I am extremely steady,” he lied. Christ, Bond was supposed to be in Dobrich along with his mobile. Instead he was in jugular distance, and it was November, and no one was going to find his carefully concealed body until one of the tourists got lost during Christmas hols and stumbled across it. 

He watched Bond, waiting for the moment of his own demise. 

Bond looked back mildly. He was dressed down, for him, in a Dior Homme winter jacket, a blue beanie, a tactical turtleneck jumper, and wool trousers. He was holding a brown leather bag in one hand. The jacket and hat said, ‘I’m on a relaxed winter holiday,’ but the turtleneck and the murder-implement-sized bag said, ‘I’m also a serial killer,’ so all in all Bond was full of mixed signals re: death. 

The silence stretched. 

“These murals have been saying what they need to say since the twelfth century,” Q pointed out. “Is it going to take you as long to come to a point, or what?” 

Bond’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. He opened his bag and pulled out...a bottle of red wine. “I’ve had a very productive month,” he said. “I thought I might say ‘thank you’ for all the good fortune you’ve been sending me.” He offered the wine to Q.  

“No problem,” Q said because he was a millennial. He immediately wanted to stab himself in the face.  _ Sending you bad people to murder or incarcerate? No problem!  _ He took the wine anyway.

“Do you want to drink this in the ‘kitchen?’” Bond asked, gesturing in the direction of the cave that had some carved stone ledges that could be used for tables or chairs. 

“Why not?” Q followed him. Cabernet Sauvignon with a gunman; apparently this was his life now. 

***

In the ‘kitchen,’ Bond pulled a loaf of bread, a smoked sausage, and two wedges of cheese out of his bag as well. He piled them on a limestone slab and sat down next to it, looking up at Q expectantly. Apparently this was going to be a picnic, because nothing said ‘international espionage’ like getting ejected by a museum docent for desecrating a sacred site with breadcrumbs. 

(Bond might have had an argument with the wine and the bread, but Christ hadn’t exactly said, “Take of this aged Gouda and Red Leicester; this is my body odor.” And those were both, now that he thought of it, cheeses that he’d had in the refrigerator of his old flat… 

Bugger it. Might as well get some good cheese out of his encounter with a professional stalker.)  

“Thanks,” Q said, sitting down on the other side of the limestone slab with the food on it. He sliced himself some bread and cheese with a knife Bond pulled out of his boot and handed to him. The knife’s sleek edge was serrated on one side and smooth on the other, and the blade angled into a wicked point. He tried not to think about how he was so unthreatening that Bond felt comfortable handing him weaponry. 

“It’s not your style,” Bond said knowingly, nodding at the knife in Q’s hand. “Too messy.” 

Q gave the knife back; Bond was right. 

Bond sliced himself some cheese and bread. He opened the wine, took a sip from the bottle, and offered the bottle to Q. 

Q drank. The wine was good. The  conversation, on other hand… Clearly he had to do something before Bond decided to go into more detail about assassination styles.  But what to say to the secret agent who’s been stalking you across Europe? 

“So,” Q said, waiting for Bond to take another drink, “do you come to ancient Christian monasteries often? Or are we popping that little cherry together?” 

Bond almost choked on his wine and ended up swallowing very deliberately instead. “Yes, we are,” he said, recovering enough to quirk his eyebrows. “I suppose we’ll have to be gentle with each other.” His warm gaze was suggestive.  

Q flushed. Could Bond be gentle, given the right motivation? Would he want Bond to be? No! He definitely wouldn’t because Bond was definitely trying to get him to join a sketchy (if government-sanctioned) secret organization. He stuffed some bread and cheese into his mouth before it could get him into any more trouble. 

As Q ate, Bond caught Q’s gaze. He glanced at the knife, and then at the wine bottle turned choking hazard, and then back at Q, as if to say that Q’s assassination style would definitely involve weaponizing quotidian objects like a wine bottle instead of anything so traditional as a bladed instrument. His mouth curved in a smile that seemed almost admiring. 

Q really wanted to smile back. But flirting was just Bond’s style. (Probably. Almost certainly.) He had to keep that in mind.    

***

Alazha Monastery was a place where hard-living men had worshipped and scraped an existence out of rock. The top floor, forty meters above the ground, contained a natural limestone cavern with a beautiful chapel built into the recess. The ground level told the story of more earthly affairs: a church and some monks’ cells, the kitchen and dining area, a crypt, a place for farming. 

As their crumbs dirtied the floor of the ancient kitchen (Q was seriously starting to wonder where the museum staff members were) they managed to find a topic of conversation after all: travel. Bond asked Q about Germany, seeming to know already that he’d spent a summer there before taking his A-levels in the subject. 

Q gave a perfunctory answer---he enjoyed the art and the efficiency---and retaliated by asking Bond about his own studies in Tokyo and Hong Kong during university. 

Rather than seeming dismayed by Q’s knowledge, Bond stretched and leaned against the stone wall to get more comfortable before launching into a fish-out-of-water story about his first time in a Japanese sushi restaurant. 

“One of my mates at the dojo, Tanaka, he invited me out,” Bond said. “He was an important fellow and I couldn’t exactly refuse even though I had never had raw fish before. I say yes, hoping that it will be a quick and casual affair---a conveyor belt kind of place. Then we walk in, and it dawns on me that he’s taken me to a particularly ritzy location. This isn’t just raw fish, this is fancy raw fish. The kind where they give you twenty different courses and it’s a deadly insult not to finish any.” Bond paused dramatically. 

“Oh dear,” Q said obligingly, unable to keep from smiling. This version of Bond was better than the seductive Mr. Carrot from Berlin. 

Bond grinned back at him. “That’s what I thought. And then I see that he’s watching me and he wants me to have that reaction; he thinks he’s going to make the _ gaijin  _ embarrass himself. Well, I instantly become determined: I am going to bloody well like this raw fish, and I’m going to prove it by eating more sushi than Tanaka does or die trying.”

“And do you?” Q asked.

“I---” Bond froze and cocked his head. A faint sound of footsteps echoed through the caves. Maybe still far away since the acoustics in here were so good. Maybe not. And the temple wasn’t big enough for ‘far away’ to be very far at all. 

“Museums do get visitors,” Q pointed out, but he was already instinctively stuffing the Red Leicester into one of his pockets.   

“I bribed the staff to take the day off,” Bond said. His hand went into his bag and came out with his gun. He stood. “They put up the closed sign.”

Q gaped and stood next to him. “You did all that but you didn’t put a pressure sensor in the front entrance?” They could have had a far earlier warning than footsteps. 

“Put a---why would I have that?” Bond frowned. 

“You can make it send a signal directly to your mobile,” Q said. He grabbed the gouda and the bread and stuffed them into his rucksack. “I used to put one under the doormat in front of my flat when I went out. Dead useful.” He glanced sidelong at Bond. What kind of secret agent was he, that he didn’t even have a pressure sensor? 

“It’s not standard issue!” Bond said, bristling. “We need to leave. Stay behind me.” He led the way down the dimly lit limestone corridor, his gun drawn in front of him.

They were heading towards the sound of the footsteps, not away. Maybe when you signed up to be a government-official murder machine they removed your sense of self-preservation. Q contemplated bolting for the stairs. 

“Stay with me,” Bond muttered without turning. “There might be more than one.” 

Point. If Q ever had to eliminate Bond, he would send in fifty people and a bear trap. Maybe an actual bear as well. He pulled his umbrella out of his bag and gripped it tight. Safety in numbers. Don’t split the party.  

In front of them, a goliath of a man stepped out of one of the monks’ cells and into their path. He was wearing a grey suit and he had a gun in his hand. 

Bond raised his Beretta. 

Never mind---splitting was good! Q leaped into a side cave just as a shot rang out. Bond didn’t need his help to get through a shootout in a bloody national heritage site. Q would stay nice and safe in this little monk cell, which---

“Shit!” He plastered himself to the wall as he registered that the cell wasn’t uninhabited. 

The man in front of him laughed. “I knew I’d picked a good spot to wait,” he said. Like muscle man, he was wearing the requisite grey suit. (Q took a moment to re-appreciate Bond’s casual winter ensemble.) However, this man looked older than the muscle outside: his short brown hair was graying, his face beginning to line with wrinkles. 

When your job involved so much violence, you probably had to be pretty good at it to get that old. Q swallowed. 

“My name is Mr. White,” the man said, walking forward. “And you, Q, have started to cause us a bit of trouble. I’m afraid we don’t like that.” He stopped half a meter away. Not quite in umbrella-range. 

Out in the corridor, fleshy thumping sounds indicated that the proceedings between Bond and the man-mountain had turned physical. Bond wouldn’t be coming to Q’s aid anytime soon. 

Q licked his lips. Was this connected to his abetting of Bond’s assassinations or to something else? How the fuck did he keep causing trouble without realizing it? “I don’t suppose you’re susceptible to bribery?”  

Mr. White smiled. 

Q shuddered. 

“Not in my organization, no,” Mr. White said. “In fact, I personally make an example of anyone who finds themselves taking...hmm, financial liberties.” He put a hand into his suit jacket and came out with a closed knife. “We’re very concerned with efficient business practices, you see.” He flicked the knife open. 

“We?” Q asked. He kept his eyes on the knife. Images of being pinned to the cave wall like a butterfly flashed through his mind. 

“Oh yes,” Mr. White said. He stepped closer, his knife centimeters away from Q’s face. “Which is why we’d like to employ you. You see, it would be much more efficient if you came to work for us voluntarily than if we had to persuade you by other means.”      

“I see,” Q said. “What---what benefits do you offer?” He mentally rehearsed his next move. Right hand, left hand. He could do this.  

Mr. White raised an eyebrow. “For starters, you can keep both of your---” 

Q never found out what he could keep because with his right hand, he slammed the umbrella by his side up and into White’s belly. With his left hand, he grabbed for White’s wrist and held it tight, jerking the knife away from his face. 

White gripped the umbrella with his free hand, trying to tug it out. As soon as the injector sounded its three-second click, signalling that all of its contents had been deployed, Q ejected the needle and scrambled away to the back of the cell, waving his umbrella in front of him to fend off White’s slashing attacks. 

“That was a mistake,” White said, his eyes narrowed. 

Q’s brain echoed the assessment. Ketamine took a couple of minutes to go into effect; White could kill him before he fell unconscious. Q should have—what? Stayed close in? Tried to pummel White’s head against the cave wall until his brains spilled out? Run out the door and into muscle man’s waiting arms? 

He should have fixed up the umbrella to be a stun gun as well as an auto-injector, was what he should have done, but it had been difficult to find the time and space for extensive redesigns. Now he was going to die because he’d been too cheap to book a private car on the train and too paranoid to stay in a hotel for more than a few hours. 

White tsked at him. “As you can see, non-lethal defenses are impractical. We’ll soon have that trained out of you. Hinx!” He raised his voice.  

There was no answer. Outside in the hall, the tumult of combat had stopped. 

Bond might be dead. 

Bashing White’s head in suddenly seemed like a good plan. Q stepped forward, umbrella held in a guard position across his body. 

White laughed. “Don’t bring an umbrella to a knife fight, son.” 

Bond appeared in the doorway. “It’s ‘Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight,’” he said, and he shot White in the knee. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bond shows off one of the Aston's tricks and arranges for M and Q to meet.

Q stood to the side while Bond stomped on White’s wrist to make him let go of the knife he still had in his grip. Disarming accomplished, Bond rolled White onto his stomach, ignoring the considerable amount of blood pouring out of White’s knee, and started frisking him.

Q must have made a noise because Bond glanced up at him and said, “Go wait in the car. I’ll be there in five minutes. If I’m not, take off.” He tossed Q a set of keys.

Between them, White made groaning I’ve-been-shot-in-the-knee noises. Mostly swears about rehab, which seemed frankly optimistic.  The ketamine was definitely kicking in. If Q ever had to get shot, hopefully it would be after someone had pumped him full of horse tranquilizer.

What would Bond do to White? What had he done to Hinx?  

No---whatever Bond did and planned, Q had no control over it. He stepped gingerly around White and Bond and made for the stairs. On his way to the parking lot, he reloaded his umbrella with another injector full of ketamine. When he got to Bond’s Aston, he left the keys in the ignition.

Then he turned towards the woods and started walking. He could get on public transport again, but running hadn’t helped him so far. Also, White’s or Bond’s people would be more likely to pick him up in an urban area with CCTV and thousands of potential informants. The nature park here had miles and miles of trails. He would get himself good and lost and come out when Bond (and Bond’s body removal crew, which he was undoubtedly calling at this very moment) had left.

Avoidance. Yes, that was definitely the way to go.

***

Avoidance, it turned out, was fucking freezing.

Q was not what you would call a Nature Person. He appreciated a good hike every once in a while. A nice park. A scenic vista. Usually in the springtime or early fall.

In the woods, in November, in Bulgaria, it was four degrees C and a bird had already shat on his arm. Q was nothing if not stubborn, however, and so he kept walking further into the fir trees, eating bread and cheese as he went. Perhaps if he ate enough his body would spontaneously generate a protective layer of fat.

While he ate, he reviewed the series of events that had led to this moment:

A man invaded his home and threatened him with a gun. Q electrocuted him and fled. The man pursued. Q threw Murderface McBadmen in his direction as a distraction. The man appreciated this, brought him a nice picnic, and two new murderous arseholes showed up, these ones apparently criminals instead of government assassins. The government hitman and the unlicensed killers both claimed Q’s actions had inconvenienced them in some way.

Inconvenienced them? _Them_? Q hadn’t been home in months. At this point he didn’t even have a flat to go back to. He had the rucksack on his back, a few bank accounts in various names, and miscellaneous technological assets. He didn’t even do laundry anymore, just bought clothes and then threw them away once they started smelling. Was a place to keep some cardigans really too much to ask of the world?

Q had only ever stolen from criminals and terrorists! He had even given some of his ill-gotten gains to scholarship funds! He didn’t deserve this kind of—well, okay, depending on who they worked for the men Bond was presently disposing of might have had an adequate reason for pursuing him, but…! None of this had happened until bloody Bond had shown up in his life like a cursed talisman.

A cursed talisman with a good sense of humor and nice taste in cheese. Fucking arsehole couldn't even be a proper prick.

Q slowed his breathing, swallowed the enormous and location-giving-away curse that wanted to come out, and ripped a few pine needles off a nearby tree. He brought them to his nose so he could focus on the sharp, cool scent instead of his frustrations.

Think, think, think: in terms of specifics, what did he want?

  1. A secure base of operations where he could store his tea and electronics, e.g., a nice flat where he would be safe.
  2. For murderers and terrorists to stop trying to kill him and capture him.



Q took another deep, pine-scented breath. What conflict resolution strategies had worked for him in the past?

For starters, the last time someone had tried to bully him in secondary school, he’d stolen their credit card information, put them into five thousand pounds of debt (the card’s maximum), and got them suspended from school by planting a knife in their gym bag. The attempt at retaliation had been dealt with via blackmail because the bully had been an idiot who didn’t know how to erase his browser history. Precious few students had tried to muscle Q into doing their homework after that.

If he was working on similar principles, what he would need to do was find Mr. White’s boss, steal all his funds and valuables, incarcerate him and his gang, and make sure that the underworld became aware that Q’s methods of vengeance had had significant upgrades since secondary school.

Q drummed his fingers against his thigh. Such an undertaking would be dangerous. It would require taxing physical endeavors. People would try to kill him a lot more. Also, he would have to be careful to resist the temptation of filling the resulting power vacuum himself: supervillain wasn’t a good look on him.

In short, he would need help. And there was really only one person he could think to ask.

***

Q walked out of the woods and back to the Aston Martin, which was now idling, and slid in through the passenger side door. The heat was on high and Q immediately plastered his frozen hands to the vents.  

“Cold?” Bond asked, darting an ironic glance at him.

“Not anymore,” Q said, ignoring the unspoken chiding.

They drove in silence while Q martialed his arguments. Five minutes in, they passed a suspiciously nondescript SUV heading the way they had come. Six’s local team?

The fact that Bond hadn’t hauled him off in the same irons as the assassin-types was as good a sign as any; Q took the plunge. “How would you feel if we worked together to take down the criminal organization that’s trying to catch me?” Q asked.

Bond’s smile was immediate.

Q braced himself for ridicule.

Instead Bond said, “I’d like nothing better.”

Q stared. Bizarrely pleasant picnic aside, wasn’t he Bond’s target? Wasn’t Bond supposed to be menacing him and dragging him back to a government basement somewhere, or possibly holding him upside down and shaking him until some more hitman addresses fell out?

“You’ll have to talk to my boss first, of course,” Bond added.

“Of course,” Q echoed, as though talking to a spymaster wasn’t the thing he’d been trying to avoid for the past few months. He glanced at the door locks; they were engaged and it was definitely too late to throw himself out of the vehicle.

Right. Bond’s mysterious boss. One woman couldn't be that intimidating, could she?

“I know a safe house near Thessaloniki,” Bond said. “It will have a secure connection to M. She’s highly intimidating and highly difficult to get a hold of without her underlings knowing about it. And for this sort of work, we don’t want them to know about it.”

“Ah, very good,” Q said with a terrible attempt at nonchalance, and then he pulled his laptop out and changed the subject as quickly as possible. “While we’re en route, I’ll see what I can find out about the men who attacked us. Were you able to glean any relevant details about them?”

Bond glanced sidelong at him. “A few.” He reeled off a matter-of-fact litany of information about both men: appearance, physical skills and infirmities, inferences and prior knowledge about their past experiences, and guesses about where both men stood in their organization hierarchy. Apparently Bond’s mind was just as dangerous as his body.

A frisson went up Q’s spine and his fingers twitched with the urge to poke, to tease, to unravel. Instead he listened and transcribed while Bond kept talking.    

“It was called Quantum when I encountered White last,” Bond said. “I killed his then-boss, but he slipped away and must have found someone else to lend himself to. We never recovered all of their stolen funds and nature abhors a vacuum.” Bitterness coated Bond’s words like the coffee stain on his teeth.

“A vexing problem,” Q acknowledged. He would have to take some preventive measures when they slashed and burned White’s organization. In the meantime, he worked on actually finding said organization by turning the variables Bond had given him into actionable search processes that he could use to pick up traces of White and Hinx in various databases.

Metal thumbnails were distinctive—they would start picking up some breadcrumbs about Hinx before too long. White would follow. Until then…

“You never said whether you ate more sushi than Tanaka,” he reminded Bond.

Bond blinked and then his face crinkled in a lopsided smile. “Oh, I ate so much that he made himself sick trying to keep up. He’s a very fit fellow, Tanaka; careful to keep his meals in reasonable portions. I have much more experience with gluttony.”

When Bond glanced at him again, he looked as though Q was something he’d like to glut himself on, too.  

***

As they traveled south and inland through Bulgaria, flat fields gave way to hilly, forested terrain, and the sun sank beneath the trees. It was the straightest route they could take. Bond did none of the doubling back or random turning that Q might have expected of a spy. Instead they motored down Route 5 at the rate of traffic, stopped at a petrol station for a wee and a fill up, and generally acted like normal motorists. Bond’s fancy Aston Martin even had the ubiquitous Bulgarian toll sticker on one corner of the windshield, the standard pop of color and barcode required of every vehicle outside of a city.

Meanwhile, Q tracked Hinx through a flurry of Brazilian police and media reports that started a decade ago. At the behest of Brazil’s largest gang, the PCP, Hinx had put himself and his sharpened thumbnails to work in Porto Alegre and São Paulo, specializing in intimidation and wetwork. He received his steel thumb caps in Rio de Janeiro and became one of the PCP’s most infamous enforcers.

At that time, he had been going by the alias ‘Rinx,’ which was the same sound as ‘Hinx’ if one used Portuguese pronunciation, but he had been born Lucas Ribeiro. Three years ago, after blinding and murdering a judge and her entire family, Hinx had fled his home country.

“Charming biography,” Bond said. “The question is, how did he go from killing people for a local gang to killing people for a multinational crime syndicate?”

“Still unclear,” Q said. “I can---oh, shit.”

Behind them, blue and white lights had started flashing in the dark. A police car was pulling them over.

Or a “police car” was. A lifetime of being conditioned to obey authority warred with Q’s suspicion that this was a little too much of a coincidence.

As Bond glanced in the rearview mirror, his mouth curved up at one corner with grim satisfaction. Had he been expecting this?

Q gripped the passenger door. “Are we going to—?” Pull over? Get in a chase with a police car? Be killed by an officer of the law who probably had connections to Bulgaria’s organized crime and who would dutifully report that they had been resisting arrest?

Bond pulled over.

The police car pulled over behind them.

Bond flipped up a bit of the dashboard and hovered his fingers over the three buttons underneath: one red, one yellow, one green. “Stay in here,” he said. He pressed the red button, got out of the car, and gave the police vehicle a jaunty wave.

As Bond waved, the lid of the Aston’s boot sprang up with a _thunk_ , blocking the back window of the car. A protective shield? Why---

A deep roar from the trunk, the crash of impact less than a second later, the muffled _thwump_ and flickering orange light of a gas tank going up in flames. A moment later, the screaming started. Someone had survived.

Outside the car, Bond pulled his gun out of his jacket and walked towards the now-destroyed police car. Q didn’t see what happened next, but the screaming abruptly got worse before dying down to a whimper.  

Nobody driving past them stopped. If anything, they drove quicker.

Bond was back in the car a minute later, smelling of smoke. He had a dark smear on his Dior Homme jacket. His dry cleaning bills must be horrendous.

Q swallowed. Why had he thought that getting in a car with a man like this was a good idea? Oh, right—because even worse men were after him. Christ. _They were going to kill us_ , he reminded himself. And he was glad not to be dead.

Bond opened the glove box, took out a different-colored toll sticker, and slapped it over the original one on the windscreen. Then he opened up another bit of the dashboard and flicked a switch that Q suspected changed the Aston’s license plate.

“Ordinarily,” Bond said, pulling back onto the motorway, “grabbing someone while they’re in transit is going to be your safest move.”

“Not in this car,” Q said. No wonder Bond had let him go in Berlin so he could fetch the Aston from the impound lot.

“They like working in the shadows,” Bond said. “I’ve shown them that I’m willing to shed a lot of light on the situation.”  

The police car continued to blaze behind them. A small part of Q wanted to go hide in a closet. Another part of him was lifting its head, sniffing the smoke on the breeze, baring its teeth in a delighted grin.

Whatever his life was now, at least it wasn’t boring.

Maybe Bond would let him take a closer look at the car once they got to Greece.

***

Q eventually found traces of Hinx's presence in Hamburg a year ago. A detective investigating the sex trafficking trade had her eyes gouged out, as did two prostitutes, presumably her informants. They were left alive but horrifically brain-damaged; Hinx had effectively lobotomized them.  

It was long odds that this detective had just so happened to piss Hinx off, which had just so happened to benefit the trafficking trade. No, this was professional; Hinx had been hired.

“Somewhere between Brazil and Germany, he found himself a new boss,” Bond mused.

“I’m going to take a closer look at northern Africa,” Q said. “The PCP has trade routes there and it would make sense for him to use those for exfiltration.” It was a vast region to search, so he honed in on a few of the larger cities, hoping Hinx had kept to populated areas.

He only just had time to steal some more processing power and get the search started. The Aegean sea glinted up at him beneath the moonlight as they drove, and it had done for the better part of an hour; the safe house was near.

“We’re here,” Bond said a few minutes later, and he pulled into the crooked garage of a seaside shack before going in to ‘clear the house,’ which Q was pretty sure was code for ‘Kill anyone who might be waiting for us.’

There were a few other houses dotting the terrain, but even by the light of the moon he could see that they were in a similar state of disrepair: faded by the sun, rusted and scoured by the salt. Two of them had broken windows. Storm damage, perhaps, too frequent or too expensive to repair. Bond returned, thankfully sans corpses, and they brought their bags inside. The high-tide marks in the sand reached nearly to the house’s doorstep; the sea was reclaiming its territory.

The dingy, barren little house had little in the way of furniture, but it had running water, a kettle, electricity, and a shockingly secure digital network, which were the important things. Q dropped his bag off to one side of the dusty queen-size in the single bedroom. Only one bed. Fantastic---Q had always wanted to share pillows with someone who probably kept a knife under his, especially when that someone had a sexy brain and impressive muscles. Definitely not a recipe for disaster.

Bond dropped his bag on the side opposite Q. His eyes flicked up and down Q’s body, and then he said abruptly, “Let’s make that phone call, shall we?” He opened the bedroom closet, unhooked a false panel in the back, and revealed a surprisingly sophisticated-looking touchscreen monitor. “She’ll still be awake,” Bond said, and he started to poke around on the monitor, apparently setting up a videoconference.  

Q’s stomach churned. He hung back, out of range of the screen. He would rather face down Mr. White again than this mysterious woman who could get a man like Bond to do what she wanted, and who also, on a side note, was in charge of the UK’s official espionage and assassination industry.

She could order Bond to kill him.

She could have Bond knock him out and carry him back to England in the boot of the Aston like a sack of potatoes.    

She could tell Bond to just leave him alone on his mad hunt for White’s organization.

She could lock him up, never to touch another computer again, or have him imprisoned, only allowed access to technology at the government’s behest.

Q squared his jaw. He still had his umbrella, much good it would do him without the element of surprise. He still had his wits. He wouldn’t go down without a fight.

A ringing sound startled him. Was that... _Skype_?

(More like Spype, his terrible brain commented.)

The person on the other end picked up the call, audio only.

“Hello, M,” Bond said, sounding pleased with himself.

“007? How the hell did you get this number?” The voice was sharp and low.

Bond smiled. “I knew you’d want to hear the good news firsthand.”

“Second-hand would work just as well at this hour.”

“It would if this were official news,” Bond countered. He explained what had happened at the monastery and Q’s mad proposal that they work together to take down White’s new organization.  

A moment after Bond stopped talking, the image of the woman who must be M popped up on screen. She had short white hair, a square jaw, and shrewd blue eyes that seemed to take everything in. She was also wearing a pink housecoat, but that did nothing to deter Q from forming the impression that she could have him flayed, tanned, and turned into a creepy leather book if she so desired.  

“If you’re going to go up against the likes of White, you’d better bloody have the balls to face me,” M said, her gaze directed behind Bond.

Q took a deep breath, straightened his shoulders, and stepped into view of the camera.

“Hmm. So you’re the young man who’s been giving 007 the run-around,” she said, appraising him.

“So you’re the old woman who sent 007 to fetch me at gunpoint and subsequently chase me around Europe,” Q replied, arching his eyebrows.

M smiled a chilly smile. “It might come as a a shock, but when someone steals Her Majesty’s money from one of our undercover cells, we tend to want it back.”

Undercover cells? Oh, fuck. Those terrorists he’d robbed way back when had actually been secret agents. So that was why they’d sent Bond after him. Still--- “You’ve spent far more than twenty thousand pounds pursuing me,” he pointed out. “Not very cost-effective.”

“007 never is,” M said. “He does, however, have an excellent record of getting the job done. So, tell me---why should I trust a petty thief with one of my best agents?” Her eyes pierced him.

Q swallowed down his instinctive protest, his mind racing. “You shouldn’t,” he admitted carefully. “I’m not loyal to you. But if he’s as good an agent as you say, then you should trust Bond’s judgment and his ability to exfiltrate himself from the situation if need be. Cost-benefit: if we fail, the only thing you’ll lose is a petty thief. If we succeed…”

A criminal organization years in the making would be brought to its knees. “If we succeed, the only thing you’ll lose is a petty thief,” Q finished. He gave her a cool smile of his own, hoping his stony eyes made his bargain clear: he would give her what she wanted, and in exchange she and Bond would leave him the fuck alone. No recruitment, no harassment, no bedeviling his footsteps. He would be just another scrawny nerd, not of interest to anyone.   

“Hmm. A tempting argument, given that you’ve already shown a distinct knack for locating unsavory individuals---and that they’ve shown a distinct knack for locating you,” M said. “You have three months to get results. And I’ll even give your little project a budget---say, twenty thousand pounds. I’m sure you know how to access it.”  

Q tried not to gape. He hadn’t thought this would work.

Next to him, Bond was radiating a distinctly smug air.

M gave Bond a stern look. “I’ll speak to you privately, 007.”  

“A pleasure, marm,” Q said wryly, and he escaped out of the bedroom before either of them could ask him to stay.

As he lingered in the hall, Q overheard a few choice phrases like “burlap sack” and “potential” and “bloody shot at” amidst the muffled lecturing from M before Bond appeared to remember that he could turn the volume down.

Bond’s responses were quieter, a low murmur behind the door.

Q went into the kitchen and flicked the kettle on. M had been just as impressive as billed but she hadn’t had him strung up by his thumbs, and he got to keep Bond while he settled a score with an evil mastermind. This definitely called for an ‘I survived’ cup of tea.

***

It wasn’t so bad, sleeping with Bond. After ending the call with M, Bond announced that he was going for a swim, and instead of joining him, Q went to bed. After a stressful day of having his life and freedom threatened, he fell asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow.

Some time later, the mattress shifted next to him and the smell of the salty sea wafted into his nose.

_Super dangerous killer person nearby_ , the sensible part of his brain tried to warn him.

_Mrrrrrph_ , the majority of Q’s sleepy self replied.

He woke up halfway down the bed, his face shoved inelegantly into the bronze curve of Bond’s waist and one arm clutching Bond’s thigh. Bond’s skin was warm and smooth against his nose and cheek, and for a long moment Q let himself hang in that soft, golden space between asleep and awake. It had been so long since he’d touched anyone at all.

Then the muscles under his cheek quivered as Bond chuckled. “Good morning, Q.”

Q sighed into Bond’s torso. Was it really?

Bond shifted beneath him, and a moment later Bond’s fingers were carding through Q’s hair, brushing pleasantly across his scalp, and shifting his fringe so Q could peer up at him, which Q did.

Bond was only wearing pants, which Q had known intellectually, but that was different than looking up and actually seeing Bond’s tree trunk thighs, his thick torso, his scarred chest, and the tempting, naked hollow of his throat.

From the amused gleam in Bond’s blue eyes, Bond knew this. Arse.

Q shivered. Evil mystery organization, he reminded himself. Very important. No time to crawl the rest of his way into Bond’s lap and see if he was as good at kissing as he was at tracking speccy boffins across Europe.

“You know, there’s still time to call M back,” Bond said, watching him closely. “She would offer you a desk job.”

Q snorted. Probably a desk job in prison, or as good as. “No,” he said. “I think I’m right where I need to be.”

Bond smiled. His cheek had a pillow wrinkle on it but his eyes were already bright and alert. “It’s day one of ninety, then,” he said, and he stood, sloughing Q off of him like water. “Shall we get started?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: This is the end of the story's first arc. No clue when I'll update again, unfortunately. (Hopefully during 007 Fest in July.) Thank you for reading! <3

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Constructive criticism is welcome. <3


End file.
